Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Vol.109, No.46, 21634-21639, 2005
Recoverable solution reaction of HiPco carbon nanotubes with hydrogen peroxide
There is increasing interest in developing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs)-based optical biosensors for remote or in vitro and in vivo sensing because the near-IR optical properties of SWNTs are very sensitive to surrounding environmental changes. Many enzyme-catalyzed reactions yield hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as a product. To our knowledge, there is no report on the interaction of H2O2 with SWNTs from the optical sensing point of view. Here, we study the reaction of H2O2 with an aqueous suspension of water-soluble (ws) HiPco SWNTs encased in the surfactant sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). The SWNTs are optically sensitive to hydrogen peroxide in pH 6.0 buffer solutions through suppression of the near-IR absorption band intensity. Interestingly, the suppressed spectral intensity of the nanotubes recovers by increasing the pH, by decomposing the H2O2 into H2O and O-2 with the enzyme catalase, and by dialytically removing H2O2. Preliminary studies on the mechanisms suggest that H2O2 withdraws electrons from the SWNT valence band by charge transfer, which suppresses the nanotube spectral intensity. The findings suggest possible enzyme-assisted molecular recognition applications by selective optical detection of biological species whose enzyme-catalyzed products include hydrogen peroxide.